How many times have you searched for something and come up
short? Searching for content over and over, with hundreds or thousands of
results, is all too commonplace. It is inefficient, ineffective and
frustrating. Popular search engines are proud of the multiple-millions of
“results” they achieve in a few milliseconds time, but is this really what we
want? Just because a search engine “can” produce thousands of results, doesn’t
mean it “should”. Most people are searching for a single result, not
thousands.That said, the purpose of
these search engines is not to give you the single piece of content that you
want, but to give you all of the potential content that you might be interested
in, especially the results that also drives advertising revenue. This scenario
is not useful in a business context.

Business users need to find a very small and relevant set of
content based on the information they have. Going back to the library example,
when I walk into a library to find a book about Java Programming, I want to be
directed to the shelves that contain only books on my subject, not books that
contain the words Java, which are out of context to the subject at hand.This is why there is a card catalog and a
Dewey Decimal System.

A business user is no different. If we are looking for
resumes for Java programmers, then we want to be given the small subset of
content relevant to Java programmers, not content that includes the word
“Java’, which could return documents that include the Indonesian island, different types of coffee
or a company that has Java in its name.

Classification systems that use Natural Language Processing
and text analysis can provide context to content and therefore, organize it
properly. Furthermore, by combining classification with enterprise search
applications, businesses can provide a robust and effective conceptual search
that delivers a highly relevant set of results.

The Bottom Line: Content must be easily accessible to those
who need it.

To know more about what Content Classification can do for your business attend the following IOD2012 sessions IBM Content Classification: The Key to Organizing your Content and How to Integrate IBM Content Classification Technology With Enterprise Content Management. To know more about ECM sessions at IOD and to register to attend visit the IOD ECM Forum

I have always pondered the
phrase, “Human beings are Social animals”
until I discovered that in our own lives how much we depend on other humans.
The emergence of interactive technologies and “engagement” tools are nothing
but ways for us to reach out to other people who are around us and within our
sphere of influence when we perform different activities in our day to day
lives. People are inherently social and they want to engage with different
entities around them. This is even more so within their organizations. They are
constantly seeking for channels to communicate directly with one another and
shape their own experiences. The need to have real-time information on
different things happening around us has shaped new technologies to support it.

Organizations today have the
opportunity to use this inherent social nature of its employees to improve
their business and increase their productivity. With the world going social, employees
are looking for social tools in an environment similar to their personal social
experiences inside their enterprises to connect and collaborate. They want to
meet more people, understand their roles and constantly seek new ways to
achieve business objectives. As part of this process, they also learn more
about each other and discover common interests that give rise to communities
and opportunities to work on subjects that interest them the most. Your likes
on Facebook help you to discover people with similar interests in your network.
Similarly, your professional social network helps you to discover new people
with similar interests leveraging the information capsules they provide when
relevant to your work. This is just one thing that I discovered which has
helped me in being more productive in my job.

“Being Social” no longer has a
negative impact on employee productivity but has started to enhance it. Thanks
to Social Business tools! Wikis, Blogs and Communities have found their way in
to most organizations. With these tools, employees now have the opportunity to
“engage” in social conversations in real-time with the people around them and
extract information residing in different information silos to put them to the
best use. Let’s take a typical day in our own work life. There are many
instances in which we encounter duplication of effort or a strong appetite to
re-invent the wheel, which results from a lack of communication and the
inability to find the information that reside in disparate locations. Often, we
are frustrated with situations such as these that impact productivity to a
great extent. So do you think now that being “Social” makes an employee more
productive? The answer from me is definitely a “yes!” Employees using Social
Business tools have the opportunity to meet experts in their job area and
connect with them. Sharing of information and knowledge helps not only to achieve
near term objectives but also fosters cross-pollination of ideas with a
strategic intent.

With organizations growing beyond
geographic boundaries, it has become an undeniable fact that businesses need a
platform to collaborate, innovate and share. But how can you optimize your
workforce with people-centric content applications? And how can you secure and
govern this social content arising from different social channels?

Come and attend the Information
on Demand 2012, to learn more on “living social” and the “future of social
content”. To learn more about ECM sessions download the ECM at IOD Agenda. Or if you're already
registered, use the SmartSite to start
planning your experience, scheduling sessions, and connecting with other
attendees and speakers.

Post 2008, governments across the world are
forced to re-prioritize their focus and are under severe pressures to do ever
more with ever less; while expectations continue to increase. This mandate is
especially true for Public Safety organizations.

With rising population in cities,
shifting demographics, technological developments and accelerating
globalization there are increasing social and commercial risks of crime. Public
safety organizations across the globe are looking at adopting transformative
technologies to make smarter decisions, deliver results and demonstrate
accountability.

Be it traditional crimes like burglary,
vandalism or mail fraud to difficult-to-trace crimes such as terrorism, money
laundering and hate crime- investigative work is highly information driven.
Traditionally, crime Investigation meant manually sifting through multiple
reports and documents scattered across multiple structured and unstructured
sources. The manual intelligence access and analysis meant a typical successful
case taking weeks or months; and public safety agencies know that time is
detrimental to success.

Combining technology and information is key to
successful crime and threat investigations, law enforcement agencies need
technology that can speed up the process of discovering, analyzing and linking
information. Content Analytics provides the capability to extract, search and
analyze crucial information from disparate sources and improve the speed and
quality of intelligence gathering. By using content analytics tools, agencies
can not only solve cases more quickly but also identify non-obvious
relationships within data that could possibly prevent a crime from happening in
the first place.

A UK law enforcement agency used IBM Content
Analytics to perform high-precision text analytics to identify phone numbers
from investigative reports which was then used to cross-reference all of the
phone numbers so that when a new document arrived, the analyst was presented
with a list of all phone numbers and for each number, a list of previous
references to that phone number. This solution would reduce analyst’s efforts
by 6 hours, which meant faster analysis of information and in the long run more
successful investigations.

Well, I work in IT, and I am a "Client Technical Professional" (otherwise known as "tech sales", "pre sales", "solution consultant" and other variations less flattering), which kind of implies a certain level of familiarity or knowledge of IT on a technical level. But I am not really - I have had little IT in my formal education, and, worse, I lack the affinity and "feel" for the technical aspects of our work that make many tasks (like building demos or learning new products) so much easier for many of my colleagues.

This is not as bad as it may seem. While I do think a certain level of competence and ability is required (how it still irritates me when a manager, consultant or sales person proclaims his/her ignorance of all things technical as if it were a badge of honour), I feel very strongly that a non-technical view of our products and solutions can be very helpful, even in my seemingly predominantly technical role. A good example of this is how we position IBM Content Analytics with our partners and customers.

I think IBM Content Analytics is fantastic. Well, let me restate this - I think what we can do with IBM Content Analytics is fantastic, amazing. And I feel very strongly that the greatest value delivered by ICAwES is in its text analysis capabilities. I think that the Content Miner is great, and offers a lot of value to our customers. But for me, the even more value is created by its text modelling capabilities. Taking this a level deeper, I feel very strongly that the tooling we offer with ICAwES 3.0 to design, develop and even deploy text analysis models (this is known as Content Analytics Studio) is of enormous value to our customers and partners. Why is this so? After all, we are talking about a modelling tool, not the stuff that normally send customers hearts all aflutter. Perhaps I can best make this argument with a diagram. Its a pretty simple one, and we have all seen it in one form or another:

OK, so nothing too exciting here either, right? Well, this is where I believe IBM´s approach creates real value. One of the characteristics I have seen in most products and solutions that deliver some form of text analysis is that someone like me cannot make any substantive changes to the model, other than maybe changing some terms in a dictionary. I need to either call in the vendor, contract a partner or invest in building programming skills. In the words of a very learned respected colleague of mine, the Content Analytics Studio tool takes text modelling out of our lab and puts it where it belongs - with the customer. It gives the customer control over the entire create/modify - build - validate - analyze process. And when you think about it, isn´t this where it belongs? After all, the customer knows their own content - knows who has created it and what it means to them right? I would argue that our customers do, and I would argue something further - this transfer of control to the customer is perhaps the single most important innovation in ICAwES. I´ll explain why I make this claim in my next entry.